Monday, September 18, 2017

If this year’s
Oscars had to be held next week (and I don’t mean to suggest I can’t wait until
March) it looks to me like the best actress race would be between Renee
Zellweger, Thora Birch, Kirsten Dunst and Piper Perabo. The combined age of
whom might just about amount to a Judi Dench. Hollywood’s always criticized for
giving the younger women all the breaks, but this is something new. Especially
as none of the four had to pretend to be in love with Michael Douglas, or with
any other contemporary of their grandfathers (well, Birch in Ghost World hooks up with Steve Buscemi,
but that’s hardly the same thing).

Piper Perabo

Perabo is in the
current Lost and Delirious, a
Canadian film about a doomed affair between two teenage boarding-school girls.
In their top floor dormitory, she and Jessica Pare share an idyllic rapport,
and a bed, until they’re discovered together. Pare quickly turns stridently
heterosexual to safeguard her reputation. Perabo, whose character is stamped
from the first scene as a potentially out of control self-dramatizer, quickly
goes over the edge – accosting Pare with Shakespearean monologues in the
library, challenging her new boyfriend to a duel with real swords, and yelling
abuse in all directions.

If I had an
impressionable teenage daughter with a touch of the turbulent poet about her, I
definitely wouldn’t want her going near this film until she’d made it safely
into her twenties. Resembling a slightly softer Angelina Jolie (who did win an
Oscar for burning through a very similar role in Girl Interrupted) and radiating as much misplaced self-assurance.
Perabo makes breakdown look like the only way to go. The movie devotes itself
to her at the cost of almost anything else – she’s allowed to rant and pose
long after the teachers should have sought serious help, and her special
relationship with a hawk in the forest is too easy a symbol of the primal force
she embodies. She’s quite excellent, and she’s certainly charismatic, but in an
abstract kind of way. Still, give her a few years, and Piper Perabo may be the
next Julia Roberts.

Apocalypse Now Redux

I don’t suppose
Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now Redux
will be eligible for any Oscars this year (on its first release, in 1979, it
lost to Kramer vs. Kramer – how dumb
does that seem now?) Coppola and editor Walter Murch have gone back to the
Vietnam epic, brushing up the image and sound quality and adding some fifty
minutes of new scenes, bringing the total running time to three and a half
hours. I haven’t watched the original for many years, so I’m not well-equipped
to carry out a before-and-after comparison (critical opinion seems generally in
favour of the new material, although with some strong dissenters too). But I do
agree with the pack that Redux is the
most impressive American movie to be released this year.

It's an engrossing
spectacle, of course – especially in the early part of the film where Coppola
feverishly orchestrates helicopters and explosions and people into an evocation
of war that’s too beautiful and vivid to be quite real. In his famous
performance, Robert Duvall is almost excessively charismatic as the brutally
effective Colonel Kilgore, razing villages as if as an afterthought while
indulging his passion for surfing: an absurdist approach that might have worn
thin if pursued for the entire movie. As it continues, the film tones down its
potentially cartoonish edge, but hones in on the intense incongruity and
confusion that are rather brashly contained in the Duvall scenes.

Martin Sheen plays
Captain Willard, sent to travel up-river with a small group, in search of an
army colonel who’s deserted and now leads a strange community in the depths of
the jungle. In one of the newly-added sequences, they encounter two Playboy
bunnies, stranded after their promotion tour helicopter ran out of fuel. Later,
they find a French family holding out on a plantation long after all others
have left, still dressing formally for dinner and engaging in conversation as
though caught in a time warp. These sequences make Redux less of a pure war film and more an abstract meditation on
political, cultural and psychological confusion (with Vietnam being one of the
all-time great media for such a project); leading more inevitably now to the
famously murky finale where Sheen finds the missing Colonel Kurtz, played by
Marlon Brando.

Kurtz is viewed by
his followers as a great man, but the main mouthpiece for this is Dennis Hopper’s
character – a standard-issue 60’s hippie photographer – suggesting that Kurtz’
power lies mainly in the very idea of transcendence (or dropping out). Brando’s
most famous line from the movie is his final apparent indictment of war “the
horror…the horror…,” but if Kurtz is
mad, it seems attributable as much to excessive introspection as to his
experiences in themselves. “It’s judgment that defeats us,” he says in one of
his monologues, and at another point: “You have the right to kill me, but not
to judge me.” The movie damns judgment, and makes it almost impossible to
render. Just when Sheen should deliver some closure to himself and to us, he
becomes incomprehensible.

The film uses fades
and slow dissolves and mist to hide the basic linearity of its structure (they
encounter one incident, then travel on up the river for a few minutes and
encounter another): it ultimately generates the sense of a world turned on its
head. It’s no great shakes as politics or analysis, and its energy sometimes
seems touched by naivete, but no other current film has even half as much going
on.

The Others

I suppose my list of
Oscar contenders should also have included Nicole Kidman – especially since Moulin Rouge and her new film The Others constitute two separate
chances (if the Oscars are as sentimental as some say, then the break-up with
Tom Cruise may constitute a third). But I thought she was swallowed up amid the
technical cartwheels of Moulin Rouge,
and she’s quite cold and unemotive in The
Others. Not that this isn’t what the film, a well-crafted haunted house
story, needs. But despite the effective mood and pacing and the nicely sprung
surprise ending, it’s hard to get really excited about a movie with so little emotional
depth. And Kidman never does anything at all unexpected in it. I’d like to see
her carry off a role in which “delirious” was a major concept, but I can’t
imagine it.

Wednesday, September 13, 2017

This is the third of
Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2001 Toronto film festival

The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke)

Haneke’s drama about
a piano teacher’s gradual capitulation to her sexual and psychological hang-ups
is so raw and intense that it skirts the outer edges of watchability. “What is
this foolish desire driving me into the wilderness?” sings a student in one
scene, and the film draws on lead actress Isabelle Huppert’s vast resources to
create a horrifying portrayal of that very journey. A severe teacher, she
barely seems to take any joy from the music, and we gradually see that her
psychological universe is just as barren, encompassing self-mutilation,
voyeurism, debasement, substantial personal risk. It often seems that she
barely has feeling, only desires, and orgasm seems abhorrent to her, as though
even momentary fulfilment and rest would be more than she could endure. The
film’s scheme includes a highly problematic relationship with her mother, and a
finally devastating one with a young student who sees through some of her
layers, but not enough of them. Haneke’s films are often set on the perimeter
of psychological viability, and The Piano
Teacher is a superb depiction of that place; it’s also a hermetic work
though, so intense that even its greatest admirers may want afterwards only to
forget it as quickly as possible.

Eden (Amos Gitai)

Gitai’s latest film
is set in 1940, a confusing and not generally well-understood point in Israeli
history. The movie does sadly little to illuminate it – it’s often so subtle in
its telling that one might miss entire events. The film follows a small group
of characters, embodying different perspectives and relationships to the
Israeli ideal, and their fates broadly point to the way forward (in the final
shot, the scene around the heroine shifts to the present day). It’s based on a
short story by Arthur Miller, who plays the father of one of the characters –
his presence is problematic, not just because he recites his lines so badly but
because his presence skews the film too much toward comfortable Western
intellectualism. For that matter though, the film’s casting is unsuccessful in
a number of key roles. Gitai uses traditional distancing techniques to prevent
easy absorption into the story and to focus the viewer on the broader
historicism; however, it often seems fuzzy in its approach, and for all the
variety of events and characters it’s very boring. One obtains flashes of
insight, usually when the movie is most straightforward in reconstructing
specific scenes or events, but no more than that. Overall, it seems like a
major missed opportunity.

Trouble Every Day (Claire Denis)

Every year there’s
at least one festival film that puts me to sleep, and here’s the one for this
year. I was awake for the whole last hour though, all the better to observe
people walking out around me. Denis’ movie is basically horror-film material –
a couple of the characters have a vampire-like condition, a doctor is carrying
out weird experiments, and his wife is locked up in the house – and it’s filmed
in a moody, meditative style (the music score is quite beguiling). The movie
links violence with sex, and the screams of the victims are as vivid as you’ll
ever hear; together with the weary familiarity suggested by the title, the
approach suggests that Denis is aiming not for mythology but for something more
quotidian and immediate. It’s often impressionistic, one event following
another through nuance rather than straightforward plotting (indeed, the movie
is surely deliberately refusing to provide explanations, to tie up loose ends,
or any of that normal stuff); it also has some striking set-pieces, and not
just the violent ones – for example, it watches the mundane rituals of a young
chambermaid who’s oddly drawn to one of the afflicted characters. But it’s very
hard to concentrate on, and never delivers anything commensurate with the
effort. I’ll concede though that a second viewing might cause this assessment
to move sharply upward. (2017 afterword –
it did).

The Man from Elysian Fields (George Hickenlooper)

When the festival
has so much material that will seldom if ever be seen again, I guess there’s
not really that much logic to spending even two hours of that precious time
watching a smooth little movie that’ll fit just fine onto cable. But the
vicissitudes of scheduling took me into this undemandingly delightful little
fable about a career-imperiled writer who agrees out of desperation to go and
work for an escort service. His first client is the wife of a fading literary
giant who later enlists him to help write a final novel. This is lightly
perverse material with lots of potential themes about whoring, integrity,
self-deception, and the relationships between them all. Unfortunately, the
movie’s heart lies mostly in what it all does to the writer’s relationship with
his wife – not that this isn’t interesting too, but it’s far more conventional.
The thing would seem more soft-centered if not for its terrific cast, including
Andy Garcia (more appealing than he’s been in years), Mick Jagger (remarkably
supple and idiosyncratic as the head of the escort service) and James Coburn
(almost at the level of his Oscar-winning work in Affliction as the older writer). And the movie has terrific
dialogue; it has the kind of one-liners and retort that used to flow from Woody
Allen’s movies at their best (albeit in a somewhat different register).

Lovely and Amazing (Nicole Holofcener)

Holofcener’s film
looks like a glossy contemporary comedy, but the movie may demand a
psychotherapist as much as a critic – it’s virtually an encyclopedia on female
angst and insecurities, spanning self-respect, body image, fear of aging,
racial insecurity, stagnant relationships, and much else besides. By the end
you feel properly entertained, but also educated and shaken – the scope is
astonishing for such a small-scale movie. Catherine Keener (whose self-loathing
and barely repressed anger is scary here) plays an unsuccessful would-be
artist; her sister is an actress, convinced that her sputtering career is a
result of her perceived physical defects. Their mother is going into hospital
for liposuction, leaving her adopted black child in the care of the two
sisters. The kid is a compulsive overeater and clearly disturbed – you worry
about the child actress as much as about the character; Holofcener exploits a
similar ambiguity in a scene in which the actress’ physical appearance is minutely
criticized by her lover. The film has more of a stopping point than an ending,
and various scenes and characters and developments are questionable too in one
way or another, but overall it’s an excellent use of provocative material in an
accessible package.

Monday, September 4, 2017

This is the second
of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2001 Toronto film festival

What time is it there? (Tsai Ming-Liang)

Tsai’s film confirms
him as a major poet of contemporary despair. A young watchseller has a brief
contact with a customer who tells him she’s going to Paris. She gives him a
cake, and it seems that this act of minor kindness shakes the structure of his
drab, circumscribed life. He becomes obsessed with changing every timepiece he
sees by seven hours, to conform to Paris time. The film is suffused in
alienation, longing and futile endeavors. His mother, grieving for her late
husband, devotes herself to rituals and superstitions that may tempt his spirit
to return (at one point she mistakes what he’s done to the living room clock as
a supernatural manifestation). Meanwhile, the girl’s stay in Paris is presented
as one lonely, mechanical scene after another. All three plot strands culminate
in desolate sexual encounters, but the film’s ending finds transcendence in
some truly inspired and deeply beautiful images. The film was often virtually
hypnotic to me. There’s no question that it’s slow and deliberate and narrow in
its preoccupations, but its central idea works perfectly: dour lives demand
grand gestures, whether physical or metaphysical, and even if these don’t
succeed as intended, it’s beyond us to assess the full scope of their
consequences.

The Pornographer (Bertrand Bonello)

A curious account of
a veteran director of pornographic movies who’s way past his personal and
professional peaks and can barely keep going. The pornographer started in the
business in 1968, when making porn was plausible as a political act, and he can
still conceive of himself as a former revolutionary, but that self-image no
longer holds. In the film’s saddest scene, the producer spontaneously takes
over the direction of a scene, disregarding the director’s fragile aesthetic
scheme to inject louder moaning and more money shots. The casting of
Jean-Pierre Leaud, archetypal 60’s French actor, as the pornographer, confirms
that the film is as much about the decline of cinema (not just of the porno
kind) as anything else. The pornographer’s story is generally presented in a
classical drawing-room kind of style, but it’s contrasted with a vaguely
Godardian treatment of his son, a student who joins an activist movement the
main weapon of which is silence, the thesis being that muteness is “the ultimate
opposition.” The juxtaposition makes for something genuinely weird and oddly
nostalgic, and at least halfway stimulating. Certainly at the end you’re left
with a convincing sense of decay and intellectual futility; given the film’s
esoteric preoccupations though, it’s hard to know how much value to place on
this. I think the film might be all but meaningless to someone not acquainted
with the heyday of New Wave French cinema (a declining breed, obviously).

The Navigators (Ken Loach)

Loach’s film shows
the readjustment of a group of Northern English railway workers after the
deregulation of the mid-90’s. The British public’s contempt for the state of
its railways makes this movie a pretty safe bet on its home turf, and Loach
punches home the easy targets, having great fun with the new customer-friendly
terminology and training video culture that suddenly gets dumped on the men. As
usual, he makes an efficient argument against capitalist excesses while paying
mere lip service to the other side; also as usual, he simplifies the real
economics of the case and grossly caricatures the corporate bosses. Largely
backed by a laconic jazz score, the movie is pretty easygoing compared to some
of Loach’s earlier works – it’s far more assured than last year’s uneasy Bread and Roses. Ultimately, his
protagonists seem like babes in the new market-friendly woods, and in the
melodramatic but affecting finale they sell their souls to keep on going; the
camaraderie of the opening stretch is replaced by a resigned, neutered
obedience. The movie is tremendously entertaining and covers a lot of ground in
an hour and a half – pound for pound, Loach is one of the prime storytellers in
the game.

A ma soeur (Catherine Breillat)

This typically
provocative film from Breillat is a further variation on her ongoing
investigation of female sexuality, this time contrasting two teenage sisters –
one a confident looker, the other clumsy and overweight. The “fat girl” (the
film’s title for English release purposes) variously gets both abuse and
affection from her sister; they’re fascinated and disgusted by each other.
“Hating you,” she says, “is like hating part of myself – that’s why I loathe
you so violently.” In the film’s key scenes, the fat girl pretends to be asleep
while her sister on the other side of the room has sex with her boyfriend – his
ruthless manipulation (you know what you’d do if you really loved me…) sets up
a continuum of exploitation and victimhood. The latter part of the film, as
their mother drives the sisters home from vacation, reduces them both back to
being just kids, and Breillat seems for a long while to be vastly overdoing the
shots of the car journey – time and again you anticipate an accident that never
comes. But then the film takes a turn that is truly shocking, and can be read
as sick fantasy, morbid come-uppance, terrible turn of fate, or as a
realignment of the sexual politics. It’s probably all four, and leaves a potent
after-impression. The movie will probably neither expand nor contract
Breillat’s circle of admirers – I found it more subtle than Romance, but not as rich as her earlier Une vrai jeune fille, although its peaks
may reach higher than that film’s.

Heist (David Mamet)

Mamet’s
stripped-down crime drama doesn’t make much of an impact; as with Robert de
Niro in the similar The Score, you
wonder whether Mamet is overly interested in sacrificing his talent to the
demands of genre. The movie’s terse plotting, snappy conversation and emotional
minimalism come from the “less is more” school, but set against the other films
I saw on the same day, it’s plainly just less. Lines like “he’s so cool, when
he goes to bed the sheep count him” try too hard for classic status, and they
read better than they sound. The film has some good twists and turns but that’s
all they are – the movie doesn’t have the philosophical and emotional richness
of Mamet’s last film State and Main,
and the frequent confusion over who’s doing what to whom gets harder to take
one you realize it’ll never really matter. Actors like Gene Hackman and Danny
DeVito keep it interesting, but they’re just fleshing out ciphers in an arbitrary
universe.

Sunday, August 27, 2017

This is the first of
Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2001 Toronto film festival

Last Wedding (Bruce Sweeney)

Sweeney’s gala
opener (a brave choice for such a spotlight) tracks the downward spiral of a
young couple’s relationship after their overly impulsive wedding; his two best
friends’ lives are simultaneously on more or less the same track. Although the
details of the three plot strands may differ, there’s not much tonal or
thematic variation to any of it, and the film seems much less rich and
provocative than Sweeney’s Dirty. He
has a taste for actors with low-key styles and just a dash of quirkiness (Molly
Parker is the best-known face, but she’s less interesting than her lesser-known
co-stars, most of whom are excellent) and a penchant for occasional shock
tactics (usually involving sex of course). Sometimes, the combination of the
two creates something quite unpredictable and unsettling. The arc of the main
relationship, from infatuation to open contempt, is thrilling in some ways (the
open contempt, by the way, never seems to completely exclude the possibility of
having sex) but it’s undermined by what seemed to me a patronizing portrayal of
the woman; she’s an aspiring country-rock singer dropped into a movie populated
by white-collar professionals like architects and librarians. On that subject –
there’s something about the line “I’m not a dinosaur, I’m a librarian” that may
stay with me for a while. The film’s weakest point of all is its ending – a
simple period/exclamation mark to cap off events, where you might have hoped at
least for a question mark of some kind.

Animal Love (Ulrich Seidl)

The festival devoted
its “spotlight” section this year to Austrian director Seidl. Of the four films
shown, I caught only this 1995 semi-documentary about a succession of
emotionally, economically or sexually marginal people and their close (and
that’s generally a euphemism) relationship with their pets. The animals –
mostly dogs (some rabbits, no cats) – put up reasonably well for the most part
with their owners’ tactile excesses, which include one scene of man/dog French
kissing and lots of dubious romping on beds. Much of the film is set in drab, confined
settings, with no good-looking people in sight, and most of it is
self-consciously posed, consisting of sad little snapshots of grim lives, or
monologues or confrontations that the camera obviously couldn’t just have
“happened” upon. Some of it though is all too obviously real – like a painful
scene of a dog sinking its teeth into another’s neck and refusing to let go.
One of the subjects says that animals have a higher moral code than humans do
(in another scene, we see this same guy and his wife advertising for sex
partners) but most of these people seem way too needy to afford morals. You
watch it with equal parts empathy and disgust, which is probably exactly the
intent. On the whole though, it’s too narrow an artistic thesis to be of
enormous interest; the film’s exploitative form certainly conveys effectively
the exploitative behaviour of its human subjects, but repetition sets in
awfully early. The movie, thankfully, left me feeling relatively secure about
my relationship with my own dog – although not entirely so.

Ignorant fairies (Ferzan Ozpetek)

A middle-class
doctor finds out that her suddenly-deceased husband had a seven-year love
affair – with another man. Numerous films, like The Daytrippers, have made entertaining diversions out of similar
ideas – Ozpetek belabors it for an entire movie. The woman makes contact with
the lover and gradually gets drawn into his circle – a slice of gay society
that’s portrayed as a colorful cavalcade of conviviality, with people always
dropping in for lunch (there’s also someone with AIDS, a transsexual…everyone
you’d expect). Her immersion in all this doesn’t make much sense except on the
vaguest level of self-discovery, healing and assimilation; the developing
suggestion that she and the lover might themselves get together struck me as
the lamest plotting imaginable. Equally simplistic are the contrast between the
lover’s warm, colorful apartment and her sterile white-walled home, and the
extension of the “liberation” theme to include a much younger man who sets his
sights on her. The lead actress is unusually frosty and glum, and her heavy
touch seemed to me to embalm much of the film. Ozpetek’s The Turkish Bath had danger signs of melodramatic excess; that
adverse promise is sadly realized here. The film’s self-regard is confirmed by
not one but two loving pans along the faces of the group within the last five
minutes, and by the outtakes and on-set footage included with the closing
credits.

Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

Kurosawa’s film
initially seems like a fantasy on the false promise of technology, with the
idea of connectivity turned on its head – ghostly websites start to appear on
computer screens, pulling the users into suicidal depression. Later on, the
film becomes broader and more apocalyptic – and also more explicitly
supernatural, which to me meant a lessening of its insinuating power (how many
films by now have created a mythology of portals to the spirit world?) Overall
though it’s the best of the five films reviewed in this article. Concentrating
almost entirely on students and people in their 20s, the film draws excellently
on youthful angst and uncertainty, and its apparent centre keeps shifting:
these are skillful genre mechanics, aided by a brilliantly sustained washed-out
color scheme and a design that locates the fearsome empty spaces even in the
best-lit and most ergonomically friendly environments. At its bleakest, Pulse posits that “ghosts and people are
the same, whether you’re dead or alive,” that there’s no real connection
between any of us, and the film’s heart certainly lies in desolation and
capitulation, regardless that it closes on a plaintive assertion of happiness.

The Business of Strangers (Patrick Stettner)

It’s definitely fair
to summarize this one as a female In the
Company of Men, although it’s more straightforward and the dialogue doesn’t
crackle nearly as much. Stockard Channing is a hard-driving businesswoman who
hooks up on a stopover with Julia Stiles, a low-level assistant that she fired
earlier in the day. The two sort of bond, get drunk, then join together to
humiliate a headhunter who may once have raped a friend of Stiles’. The movie
is dark and moderately potent in contrasting economic and sexual concerns and
neuroses, finding affinities and enmities between the two women in equal
measure. For example, Channing’s economic upper-hand is overturned when she
identifies Stiles as “privileged little brat” who’s never had to work for
anything, and whose attitude is rooted in complacency; her own modest origins
still rankle. By the end the landscape is so confused and fractured that
conclusions are hard to draw; the movie may be overstating the inherent
interest and novelty value of the premise that women can be as multi-layered as
men. It’s dramatically pretty satisfying though on the whole, and at 84 minutes
it's nicely concise. Channing and Stiles are both excellent.

Sunday, August 20, 2017

In the wake of
September 11, as a consensus settled in, a few people took heavy criticism for
straying off-message. Bill Maher and Susan Sontag – both questioning the prevailing
notion of “cowardice” – were the most prominent examples. A lesser-known but
more truly subversive statement came from the German composer Karlheinz
Stockhausen. At a press conference for a series of concerts in Hamburg, he
said: “That characters can bring about in one act what we in music cannot dream
of, that people practice madly for 10 years, completely fanatically, for a
concert and then die. That is the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos.
Against that, we composers are nothing.”

Crafted by Lucifer

This produced a
storm of protest, against which Stockhausen tried to back off, explaining that
the “work of art” in question was crafted by Lucifer, and thus loathsome. But
it was too late, and scheduled concerts of his music were cancelled both in
London and in New York. I suppose Stockhausen’s subsequent explanation of what
he meant is plausible if you interpret “greatest work of art for the whole
cosmos” as a value-neutral term. But who would have read it that way?

Among the movies
that were canceled or postponed around that time, some raised concern because
of a similarity of subject-matter (plots featuring terrorists or aircraft
hijackings); others because of a more general nervousness about abrasive
material. For example, Training Day,
which has no discernible connection, was pushed back a few weeks. But no one,
to my knowledge, ever had much concern over releasing John Dahl’s Joy Ride. To be sure, there’s nothing in
this film either that explicitly evokes September 11. But starting from
Stockhausen’s weird take on events and the antipathy it aroused, it seemed to
me that if there’s been a case for holding back any film at all, then Joy Ride should maybe have been the one.

The film depicts two
easy-going brothers and a female sidekick on a cross-country road trip, who use
a CB radio to play a trick on a trucker who strikes them as having a dumb
handle (Rusty Nail) and a dumb voice. Things backfire, horrendously, when the
prank results in Rusty Nail beating a man to within an inch of his life. They
scoot out of town, but the trucker has discovered their identity and is out for
revenge. From then it’s an extended game of cat and mouse, as the huge truck
perpetually bears down on them.

Pure sadism

But if the cat is
driven mainly, as cats are, just by the instinct to kill the mouse, he also
seems to have some major advantages. We, like the characters, never see the
trucker. But he sure sees them. He unobtrusively spies on them and gathers
information, yet at key moments always contrives to be safely behind the wheel
of his far-from-unobtrusive megaton vehicle. He takes steps that would have
required a vastly implausible degree of foresight. Numerous reviews pointed
this out, normally with some amused affection – the film received decidedly positive
reviews overall. The New York Times
for example: “The sight of his vehicle slicing through the night and the sound
of his phlegmy growl on the radio are sufficiently chilling to keep some
nagging questions at bay. How does he learn so much about Lewis, Fuller and
Venna, and how is he able to be both in front of them, leaving messages and
setting traps, and hot on their tails? Precisely because he’s an invisible,
inexplicably malignant presence, with no motive other than pure sadism, those
questions seem irrelevant. All you need to know is that those kids need to get
away from him, and fast.”

The Times didn’t make any reference in this review to September 11, although
it’s been doing so regularly for movies that seem problematic in one way or
another. But think about that second to last line – the notion of inexplicable
malignancy. Joy Ride has most often
been compared to Steven Spielberg’s Duel.
But we’ve all seen any number of movies in which the villains are implausibly
well-equipped, or unfeasibly quick in staying ahead of the hero, or have an
absurdly grandiose motive, or make too many escapes from the edge of death. The
trucker hero is merely an extension of so many gravity-defying supervillains.
And it’s always been a given that anonymous people perish along the way.

Time to end

But this abstracted
attitude, more than brutal events in themselves, is at the heart of the movies’
troublesome romanticizing of violence. It’s a way of evading the real
implications of such acts; creativity crowds out culpability. Right after
September 11, commentators predicted the end of irony, the end of filmed
violence, the end of reality TV – reality had become so real that nothing short
of extreme scrupulousness could ever measure up. But they were wrong – for now
there’s still a place for hard-edged escapism. But really, if you think about
it for a second, should it be fun to watch “pure sadism”? After all, that’s how
most of us have chosen to label the terrorists. We know they have motives and a
worldview, but the consequences for the West are so horrific that we can barely
accept them as such. So, effectively, as far as we’re concerned, they’re pure
sadists. And there’s nothing that’s “fun” about them, or what they might yet
do, or what the pursuit of them might do to us.

In the thirty years
since Duel, dozens of films functioned
by positing such sadism – in our homes, our institutions, our trains and planes
and buses. But now we know it exists, and what the consequences are. Surely it’s
time for such gleeful choreographing of violence to end. Joy Ride is negligible as a character piece, or as something
meaningful, so it’s the style and pace and orchestration that critics are
responding to. But Rusty Nail is actually exactly the kind of “artist” that
Stockhausen was pilloried for evoking.

The irony is that we’ve
been awed by stunts and special effects for so long, they’ve become routine.
Even if you pursued Stockhausen’s line of thinking, I doubt the terrorists
would qualify as great artists – they’re not original enough for that. They’d
merely be echoing the cold-minded commerce that underlies such movies.
Stockhausen’s statement was almost as barren as a commentary on art as on
politics. But the antipathy he aroused ought to be the death knell for a
certain type of cinema.

Tuesday, August 8, 2017

Maybe the title of
the Coen Brothers’ new film, The Man Who
Wasn’t There, gives the strategy away a bit too much. The Coens’ films have
occasionally been criticized for having more style than substance, for
constructing dazzling structures and surfaces at the cost of much emotional or
thematic weight (although, times being what they are, they’re probably among
the five or ten most esteemed American filmmakers nevertheless). Maybe the new
film is their attempt to take this point of view head on – to construct perhaps
their most dazzling surface yet, while making it harder than ever to locate the
movie’s centre – indeed, glorifying the very absence of one.

The Man Who Wasn’t There

The movie is cast in
the mold of a classic film noir – a twisted tale of adultery, double-crossing,
sexual tension and murder, with lots of devious plotting, misplaced guilt, and
juicy characters (with names like Creighton Tolliver and Big Dave Brewster).
It’s even shot in black and white – although the tones have an ultra-modern
silvery shine to them. Billy Bob Thornton plays Ed, a 40s small town barber who
doesn’t talk much, except to the audience in his voice-over narration. His wife
is having an affair with her boss, and when Thornton has an impulse to invest
in a new-fangled business venture (dry-cleaning), he decides to raise the money
by blackmailing the boss. Things lead to a late-night fight between the two
men, and Thornton kills him, but it’s his wife who gets arrested. Which, of
course, is merely the film’s first act.

Thornton perfectly
embodies the character’s extreme recessiveness and oddly abstract quality – the
character does the things that film noir characters have always done, and that
we’ve always known to attribute to avarice or sexual jealousy or a wretched
temper or suchlike. In this case, the motivation is stripped away – Ed just plays
the cards he’s dealt, regardless where they lie with regard to the law. The
film’s several references to UFOs seem designed to orient us toward the cosmic
– and maybe Ed’s most tangible quality is a vague yearning for transformation.
He becomes preoccupied with a young girl who plays the piano – he doesn’t have
much of a sense of what the music’s about, or of how good she really is, but
she seems to embody a notion of something finer. When she reveals herself to
have a cheap streak, it’s basically the end of the road for him.

The Coens have fun
with the classic tropes of the genre, and the movie is always entertaining. But
it’s an odd project, and a bit of a barren one. Ed could have been one of the
scariest creations in movie history, and I think everyone involved knows that,
but the movie sells those implications short for the sake of a more insinuating
overall effect.

Together

On the subject of
easy-seeming titles, what about the Swedish film Together, which depicts life in a mid-70s commune? When I tell you
the film concludes with a soccer game in the snow, uniting just about everyone
in the cast (even the suspicious next-door neighbor), and with an ABBA song on
the soundtrack, it’s fair to expect a pretty soft touch of a movie. And that’d
be true maybe half of the time. But the ABBA song is S.O.S., the lyrics of which strike at least a slightly plaintive
note in this context. And along the way, the film is fairly clear-eyed and raw
about the limits of this living arrangement.

The commune, with
its notions of openness and self-sufficiency and ideological purity, looks
quaint from this distance – perhaps from any distance. Director Lukas Moodysson
is hard-pressed not to play some of the characters purely for laughs – such as
the born-again lesbian who zooms in on every visiting woman (for some reason,
her ex-husband’s parallel discovery of homosexuality seems like a more
meaningful growth journey). And he builds the film around a rather dull story
of a woman and her kids who’ve moved into the commune to escape a loutish
husband. But his vivid, intimate approach, darting between incidents, builds
considerable authenticity, and the movie’s infectious quality ultimately seems
legitimately earned. The film suffers though through being reminiscent of Lars von
Trier’s The Idiots, another
commune-based film with a more daring thesis and a wider emotional range.

Mulholland Drive

The title of David
Lynch’s Mulholland Drive definitely
doesn’t give too much away. Skeptics might say that the movie doesn’t either. The
Coens’ movie may have a man who isn’t there, but you can’t be sure that Lynch’s
has any real characters at all. At first it seems to be about a young actress
who comes to seek her fortune in Hollywood, and crosses paths with a femme
fatale-type who’s on the run from something but can’t remember what. Hints of
conspiracies and weird doings haunt the edges of this central story. But after
about ninety minutes, the movie goes into a very different mode, in which the
relationships between the characters have all changed, and most of what’s been
set out so far now appears unreliable.

The internet is
already full of speculation on what the movie actually means (there’s a
particularly heroic effort at salon,com). I can’t add much to questions of
literal interpretation (such as whether or not the entire first section is
merely the dream of one of the characters). In broader terms, the crux of the
movie seems to me to be the narcissism and self-absorption at the heart of
Hollywood – the image-making and self-positioning. If this seems a rather
old-fashioned theme, more suited for a Hollywood that’s largely been lost –
well, that’s what Lynch gives us here: a faded, seedy milieu where artistry
takes second place to staying on the right side of gangsters.

The title of Lynch’s
movie evokes a scene that’s played twice in the film, first as the centre of an
apparently deadly plot, the second time as a stopover on the way to another
dumb Hollywood party. So maybe that’s a hint to what’s going on. But of the
three films reviewed here, Lynch’s is clearly the least susceptible to
conventional analysis and description. Immediately after watching it, I thought
I preferred the relative coherence of The
Straight Story, and I thought Lost
Highway and Blue Velvet more
scintillating examples of Lynch’s “weird” mode. But the movie’s stayed in my
mind – not so much because of its narrative mysteries, but because of the sense
that Lynch has captured the complexities of something real and significant
while still indulging his considerable idiosyncrasies to the hilt. Lynch and
Coen shared the Cannes best director prize this year, but I’d say Lynch should
have had it all to himself.

Sunday, August 6, 2017

In Francis Veber’s The Closet, Daniel Auteuil plays a
rather mediocre accountant who overhears that he’s going to be fired. This
happens in a washroom stall of course; in movies, the washroom stall regularly
yields up secrets that in real life couldn’t be cracked by the FBI. So that evening
he nearly kills himself by jumping off the balcony. Most of us would probably
view this as an over-reaction (he could at least have waited until it was
official) but we’d be forgetting that thwarted suicide is a time-honored device
for kicking off a comedy set-up. He’s saved by his new neighbor, who gets him
talking, and the next morning presents him a grand scheme to stall the firing.
If a company fired an employee right after finding out he was gay, it would be
obvious discrimination. So Auteuil has to come out of a closet that he was
never in!

Lost in translation

If you think this is
a witty and imaginative premise, then the movie will probably work just fine
for you. The audience I saw it with (which, for whatever reason, contained a
higher than average quota of elderly ladies) seemed highly predisposed to enjoy
it. Several people laughed themselves silly, in the opening minutes, at the
following unremarkable exchange: “Poor guy”/”He’s an idiot.” Maybe they were
Francophones, responding to something that the subtitles lost in translation.
There was even a fair-sized smattering of applause at the end, which is unusual
nowadays.

But as Letterman
sometimes says about some of his routines, The
Closet only has the appearance of
comedy rather than being the actual thing. It’s only eighty minutes long, and
moves along pretty quickly, as an actual comedy would. As well as the stuff I
mentioned already, it has twists and turns, fights, misunderstandings, an over
the top nervous breakdown, and a guy wearing a condom-shaped hat. Sounds like
comedy to me so far. But Veber is up to his usual trick (last exhibited in the
equally awful, but also much-loved The
Dinner Game) – he makes a movie so anachronistic and musty that it ends up
seeming as if he’s mining some kind of wonderful classicism. The film opens
with the kind of jaunty sitcom music you never get in a movie any more, and its
title pops up on screen in big red lettering of the kind that was used to
advertise Carry on Doctor. The
cinematography of Veber’s films doesn’t exactly fall into the “painting with
light” category – everything’s bright and plain and to the point. No shadows to
be seen, literally or figuratively.

Gay-friendly

Veber’s plots often
spring from unlikely schemes or ploys that push one or more of the characters
into excess. In The Closet, Gerard
Depardieu (his every scene suffused with the sense of physical and artistic
bloat) plays the factory’s homophobic personnel manager. Some colleagues
convince him that in the company’s new gay-friendly environment, he may lose
his own job if he doesn’t tone it down and reach out to Auteuil. Depardieu is
funny for a while, but then the character’s supposed to get confused about what
his real feelings are, and everything goes adrift (he ended up reminding me of
Herbert Lom’s Inspector Dreyfus in the Pink
Panther movies).

The theme of The Closet, such as it is, is that by
introducing some sexual ambiguity into the way he’s perceived, Auteuil gains
greater confidence and control over his own life, and rubs off a positive
influence on most people around him. A co-worker who’s ignored him for five
years suddenly finds him attractive; his disinterested son starts dropping in
for dinner. But the film is a stacked deck. In a company employing close to a
hundred people, would the revelation of one homosexual really be such a
galvanizing topic? Not in downtown Toronto for sure. The Toronto audience seems
to go along with it anyway, on the basis I suppose that the film’s not about us
but about someone else (maybe it’s set in the same France that the Coneheads
come from).

Veber only ever
works in France, but he reportedly prefers living in Los Angeles, rendering his
films somewhat foreign (and therefore subject to being allowed some slack) no
matter where you’re from. Even the title sums up the fuzziness. The Closet is a perfectly generic,
easily digestible, title for a comedy with a gay premise. But since the movie
is specifically not about being in,
or having been in, a closet, it seems a lazy choice.

If only Veber had
slowed down occasionally and traded in a little efficiency for the sake of
individuality. This year’s films have been severely short of interesting
characters. But at least a couple of them turn up in another current movie,
Crazy/Beautiful. Kirsten Dunst plays
a rich girl who’s into drink and drugs and heading nowhere fast. She hooks up
with a diligent, hard-working kid from an immigrant family (Jay Fernandez), and
starts to pull him off track.

Crazy/Beautiful

If The Closet occupies a nowhere land of
its own, Crazy/Beautiful is at least
recognizably contemporary. It’s a rather compromised version of that though –
reportedly due to commercial pressures on the director John Stockwell (it
certainly looks that way in the finished film). Dunst seems game for just about
anything, and in some of her high-octane freewheeling life force moments is
just about as naturalistic as any actor ever gets. But the film is restrained
on the details of her condition (we don’t see any drugs or sex), and has rather
too many easily digestible montages of frolic and fun, and too much of its lush
California setting in general. The ending is soft, although maybe all I mean by
this is that it’s a happy ending. Basically, for all its qualities, Crazy/Beautiful ends up seeming mainly
like a movie for teenagers.

But it has some
genuine pain tucked in there. Dunst’s father, played by Bruce Davison (who
suggests a more complex back story and inner calculation than the film can
accommodate), advises Fernandez to stay away from her for its own good,
essentially writing her off to oblivion. Davison’s character is a former
radical, now a Congressman, still apparently in touch with his idealism, which
makes this personal betrayal all the sadder, and Dunst’s reaction when she
finds out is as lacerating as it should be. Sometimes at least, the movie
manages not to pull its punches. Even if you’re not a teenager, it’s a much
better use of time than The Closet.
Even if you’re gay. Even if you’re just pretending to be.

Sunday, July 30, 2017

I don’t digress as
much on these columns as I used to. Three or four years ago, the movie at hand
would often be filtered through an anecdote about my wife or my dog or a
passing comment on the political issue of the day: the intention was that the
personal elaboration should serve to illuminate the film, but with hindsight I
doubt how often it succeeded. Nowadays I’m a bit more disciplined about that
much at least. But, for one week only, the new Mexican film Amores Perros will prompt a major
regression, for this is one of the great dog movies of all time – and who could
write about that impersonally?

About Pasolini

My dog is a
two-and-a-half-year old Labrador retriever, and he wouldn’t do very well in the
hard-edged canine world of Amores Perros,
for he’s very sweet, without an aggressive bone in his body, and he’s a bit of
a coward too. He’s named Pasolini, and yes, that is a reference to the
corrosive Marxist homosexual poet and director Pier Paolo Pasolini, who was
murdered under sordid circumstances in 1975 (I’m always a bit disappointed, in
this culturally sophisticated city, how few people get the reference).
Pasolini’s The Canterbury Tales is
one of my favourite guilty pleasure type movies, and the perversity of saddling
a little puppy with such a loaded name always appealed to my wayward side, but
it’s been a great name for him apart from that – it has a playful air about it,
and we generally call him Paso for short, which sounds properly mischievous.

Anyway, I’ve never
made any secret about it that the dog was my wife’s idea, and I just sort of
went along with it, and I thought I’d made a terrible mistake in the early days
when the dog acted like a little terror and bonded solely with my wife – I was
at best ignored and at worst snarled at. But we came through all that, and Paso
and I are now real buddies. We must be real buddies, because the dog absorbs
hours of my time, and yet I still provoke him so he can use up a bit more. If
you’ve ever been downtown, especially in the St. Lawrence market neighborhood,
and you saw an 83-pound lab pulling along a thin guy, that was probably us.

My wife and I both
feel that our lives are much fuller for having Pasolini, that tending to him
keeps us better-balanced, maybe tending off potential selfishness or self-absorption;
and we’re both constantly moved by him, seeing something mystically fascinating
about the depth of his happiness and goodwill. Sadly, we may learn something
from him about lows as well as highs, for Paso isn’t in the best of shape – he
has hip dysplasia affecting his hind legs, and degenerative arthritis in his
front (this, I repeat, at the age of two and a half).

Dogs in film

My experience with
Paso doesn’t mean I’ve become a sucker for every dog-related merchandising
scam, although it’s the only thing that made me pay to see Dog Park (I would have seen Best
in Show regardless, but I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed it as much). But
whenever I come across an essay or an article about the magical qualities of
dogs I smile in recognition. And I certainly seem to remember a lot of movies
primarily for their dog content. The dog wearing shoes in Bowfinger cracked me up, for instance, and it seems to me a major
problem in the current documentary Dark
Days that we never find out what happened to the four dogs that lived
underground with their owner, once he was installed in an above-ground
apartment.

Of course, dogs are
normally used in movies for sentimental purposes, and I’m a sucker for that
too. AmoresPerros is notably free of sentimentality. On the contrary, the
movie is so raw in depicting dog fighting and related abuse that it’s aroused
some minor controversy.

It consists of three
interlocking narratives. The dogfighting provides a backdrop to the first, in
which a young unemployed man tries to earn enough money to run away with his
brother’s wife by putting his Doberman to work in the fighting pits. In the
third narrative, a former guerilla lives as a down-and-outer with a collection
of mangy dogs, foraging for garbage and occasionally taking on hit-man
assignments. These are gritty, hard-edged stories, roasted in the sweat and
striving of the city’s back streets, with the threat of violence vivid in every
breath the characters take.

Under the floorboards

The middle story is
about a supermodel who moves in with a new boyfriend, injures her leg in a car
accident, and spends long days in her sterile apartment as the relationship
falls apart. The dog in this section is a fuzzy little thing who gets trapped under
the floorboards, where his sad yapping haunts their days and nights: the plight
of this pampered little thing, although real enough, seems potentially trivial
against the savagery of the other two sections. This section of Amores Perros plays a role similar to
the Catherine Zeta-Jones sequence in Traffic
– it’s easier to shrug it off as a contrivance (I guess it’s always easier to
shrug off the problems of the rich than those of the poor, especially if they
don’t seem to deserve their money to begin with) but it provides different
thematic territory and at least demonstrates the scope of the director’s
talent.

I don’t think Amores Perros has any points of
brilliance, but it has many of great interest. Sometimes too reminiscent of Pulp Fiction (the three interlocking
narratives involving various shifts in time; a relish for the contours of
low-life dealings), and with a visual style typical of so many recent
Dogme-style movies, it ends up with its own identity, Much of this reflects its
immersion in the currents of Mexico City, but it also speaks to how director
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu keeps things intimate, never letting attitude and
grand design overwhelm the characters.

Amores Perros was nominated for the foreign film Oscar
this year, but lost to Crouching Tiger,
Hidden Dragon, which seems to me the right result. The first time I saw Ang
Lee’s film I was dazzled by the choreography but it took a second viewing for
me to appreciate the film’s philosophical elegance. I doubt whether a second
viewing of Amores Perros would be as
revealing. And with Pasolini’s demanding walk and play schedule, I’m lucky I
get to see as many movies as I do even once.

Wednesday, July 19, 2017

The US stage hit The Vagina Monologues played recently in
Toronto, and received a surprisingly snippy reception from local critics. They
found it obvious, even puerile. Leah McLaren, for instance, characterized the
play as an expression of frustrations and repressions that most (just Canadian?)
women her age were never burdened by to begin with. Which isn’t to say that
there’s no such thing as genre-based behavioural difference – McLaren cites her
fascination with her own eggs. But these differences may now be sufficiently
clearly stipulated that stridency or militancy on the issues appears woefully
obsolete. On the other hand, The Vagina
Monologues was a hit – so maybe it’s not so obvious to everyone.

Dr. T & the Women

I work on a team of
23 people, of whom only 3 are male. Given how much of my own day involves being
the only man in sight, I’ve been thinking that when I look back on this period,
I may realize that Robert Altman’s recent Dr.
T & the Women should have been an emblematic film in my life. In that
film, Richard Gere as a prosperous Southern gynecologist negotiates female
trouble galore, from wives and daughters to adoring staff to an over-scheduled
appointment list that finds the waiting room in perpetual chaos.

Gere plays it cool
and laid-back, and although his performance was compared to Cary Grant in some
quarters, I read the film more as a chronicle of smugness earning its
comeuppance, in which Gere learns more than he can handle about female
diversity. And how much diversity is that exactly? Well, nothing special – just
that a woman might be content to abandon a love affair at a certain point, or
might be amazed that anyone could expect her to leave her career to serve a
lover’s vision. I doubt that Altman finds these ideas revelatory, but Dr. T
does – and the movie consequently ends in a vision of utter cataclysm. I think
it works very well, as long as you take the grimmest possible reading of what
the protagonist’s attitude really amounts to.

Watching the new Mel
Gibson comedy What Women Want, I was
often reminded of Altman’s film (not just because Helen Hunt plays the hero’s
main object of affection in both cases), but usually to the newer film’s
detriment. Dr. T opens with one of
Altman’s trademark long, highly orchestrated sequences, tracking the comings
and goings at the waiting room as things gradually fly out of control – the
scene is a blizzard of incident and observation that perfectly establishes one
of the key coordinates of Gere’s universe even though (or in large part
because) he doesn’t appear in the scene. What
Women Want, in contrast, opens with a very broad explanation of its
protagonist’s problems – he’s a heel who treats women like objects, because he
grew up around too many Las Vegas showgirls and gamblers.

Now grown up into a
successful ad executive, he’s threatened by the arrival of a new female boss
(Hunt) who wants to take the agency in a more female-friendly direction.
Researching feminine products that night in his bathroom, he suffers a freak
accident that gives him the power to hear women’s thoughts – a talent that he
exploits to forge better relationships with his colleagues and his teenage
daughter and to steal Hunt’s ideas before she even knows she has them.

Rat Pack

The film has very
little complexity – it’s simply plotted, moving straightforwardly from one
set-up to the next – but it’s strangely literal in its approach to the subject.
The accident (attributable to partial electrocution while wearing stockings and
surrounded by cosmetics) is dramatized more painstakingly than anything else in
the film, as though the viewer might be expected to try it at home. A character
tells Gibson, “If you know what women want, you can rule,” and as far as I can
tell, the film accepts straightforwardly that there is something that women
(distinct from men) want, that it’s possible to know what that something is
and, indeed, that you could ride that insight to glory. Somehow though, the
movie dances around revealing much about what the something might be (it’s
pretty well-established that better sex is part of it though – go figure).

The film’s main
strength is probably Gibson, radiating good spirits, chattering away and clad
for much of the movie in form-fitting black that makes it look as though he’s
attending some kind of improv workshop. He’s ingratiating for sure, but nothing
about the performance connects very deeply. At some point it appears that he’s
passed from merely exploiting his abilities to learning from them (becoming a
nice guy), but from what’s presented it’s entirely plausible that he’s merely
learned how to be a more subtle and efficient heel. This though is the kind of
ambiguity that the film consistently fails to detect or accommodate. Another
example – Gibson’s character is an aficionado of vintage Sinatra, and the film
is accompanied by the emblematic renditions of songs like I Won’t Dance and I’ve Got
You Under My Skin. But one simply can’t tell to what extent this is
supposed to put us in mind of the misogynistic, rat-pack contortions of that
period in Sinatra’s life.

Mirror of society

To sum all of that
up, the title of What Women Want
ought to be ironic, but it isn’t. The title is apparently reminiscent of a
question asked by Freud, but I think the movie may be inspired more by
Christina Aguilera (they might have made a good Joan Crawford movie out of it
though, circa 1942). Maybe this is the epitome of a movie that looks mildly
daring to small-town fundamentalists and regressive to seen-it-all urban
liberals. It’s a huge hit, so it must do the trick for someone. Maybe our views
on gender differences, while progressing in some areas, just go round in
circles on others (I used to think that the 1968 movie Guide for the Married Man and the 1972 The War Between Men and Women had titles and premises that would
never be utilized nowadays, but I may have to reconsider).

It's rather
mysterious to me that Helen Hunt would have made these two films in quick
succession. She’s regarded as one of the more intelligent and perceptive
actresses, so what would be the appeal of playing twice over a woman who’s
little more than a vehicle for a man’s self-discovery? But they say Hollywood
is a mirror of society, so maybe she’s on to something. Still, I would have
thought that Ann Hulbert closed the issue off in a recent New York Times article: “What do women want? The answer…is obvious:
everything. (Isn’t that what everyone wants?)” Might not sound so profound, and
I think Altman was on to it, but it’s more than you’ll get from Mel Gibson.

Wednesday, July 12, 2017

Cast Away is one of the more intriguing recent Hollywood films. If nothing else,
it exhibits some mild audacity in the face of commercial expectations,
primarily by devoting the greater part of its length to largely silent
sequences, featuring a single actor, alone on a desert island. The castaway,
Chuck Noland, is played by Tom Hanks, the only survivor from the crash of a
Federal Express cargo plane. He spends four years alone, before setting out to
sea on a raft. The film’s trailer, and just about all reviews of the movie, are
pretty open about the fact that he makes it back to civilization – this isn’t a
story of what, but of how.

Hanks’ third Oscar?

Hanks’ commitment to
the role pays off in a physical transformation that’s quite moving at times. At
the start, he effectively suppresses his mannerisms, sketching a driven,
comfortably plump businessman who preaches the gospel of timeliness and tears
himself away from Christmas dinner to do the company’s bidding. I’ve always
thought that Al Pacino’s performance in The
Godfather, from fresh-faced outsider at the start to dead-eyed Don at the
end, marked one of the most chilling transformations in any film; Hanks almost
matches that standard here. After the action leaps four years, Zemeckis
provides a long close-up of Hanks eating a fish that he’s speared – his eyes
don’t blink; they’re held steady by faded resignation, just staying alive,
keeping on breathing, waiting. As I write, I don’t know whether Hanks won a
third Oscar for this – but if he did, he deserved it more than the previous
two.

I like the film, but
I don’t think it’s as adventurous as some commentators have claimed. It’s
around two and a half hours long, but it goes by in a flash. In an age when so
many mundane offerings (like Hanks’ The
Green Mile) plod on beyond the three-hour mark, I started wondering whether
the film mightn’t have been even better if it were longer. I started thinking
how stillness, repetition and silence paid off for Chantal Akerman in Jeanne Dielman (a 200-minute study of a
housewife), for Andy Warhol, for Jacques Rivette in several films.

What Lies Beneath

Of course, when I
say paid off, I’m speaking artistically rather than commercially. American
films don’t show loneliness, boredom, repetition – that’s as good a reason as
any why they generally don’t tell us much about the way we live. They
communicate those states of being – if they’re necessary for the plot – through
montages, or snatches of dialogue, or close-ups. Cast Away is no different in this regard. It doesn’t particularly
make us feel the weight of Hanks’ four-year isolation. It telegraphs that state
as American films always do. The scenes on the island are hardly lacking in
incident – actually Zemeckis speeds along quite zippily from one pivotal
incident (learning how to open a coconut, extracting a diseased tooth) to the
next (learning how to make fire, catching a fish). We see Hanks talking about
building a raft – the next thing we see, it’s all ready to go.

Bear in mind that
the filming of Cast Away closed down
for a year to accommodate Hanks’ physical transformation, and in the interim
Zemeckis completed an entire separate movie – What Lies Beneath, released last summer. What Lies Beneath was hardly as ambitious a project as Cast Away, but it shares an unusually
deliberate pace for a mainstream film, a certain structural adventurousness
(most of the first half of What Lies
Beneath is devoted to a plot that turns out to be a tease, and irrelevant
to the film’s ultimate direction) and it’s unusually restrained and contemplative
for a thriller. Consider the long sequence in which Michelle Pfeiffer lies
paralyzed in her bathtub as the water level slowly rises – staged without
background music, building considerable suspense from the fact of her stillness
and inability to act.

For me, the
comparison with What Lies Beneath is
instructive regarding Cast Away’s
limits. I don’t think the film is a radical departure from storytelling norms
and techniques; it’s a variation on them, but positioned safely within
accessible limits. For example, Zemeckis’ use of space and silence is unusually
striking for a mainstream film, but it doesn’t have the transcendental quality
of Antonioni, or even of David Lynch in The
Straight Story. At times it comes close. It seemed to me that the film
contained an intriguing recurring use of circular motifs – an overhead shot of
the life raft, the fading light from Hanks’ flashlight as he falls asleep in a
dark cave, followed by the sun streaming in through the entrance; girlfriend
Helen Hunt’s picture inside an antique pocket watch; his friend Wilson (see
below). But when Hanks is on a plane coming home after the rescue, we see a
view of hundreds of fields below, the landscape divided into countless
geometrically precise parcels – instantly and subtly conveying the
disorientation that accompanies Hanks’ return to order. At the very end, Zemeckis
simply allows the character to bask in the vastness of the American landscape
and its attendant possibilities.

Return to the world

Many critics have
found the material on either side of the desert island sequence lacking – too suffused
in mainstream values and attitudes to do justice to the modest radicalism of
the film’s centre. Personally though, I thought the closing stretch was
well-judged in conveying Noland’s sense of the world to which he returns –
sterile spaces, strange artificial noises and (in a scene no less acute for
being an easy mark) a buffet table piled with barely appreciated food. When he’s
reunited with Hunt, and neither has any reference point for how to behave, the
scene convincingly charts the odd topography of their conversation. And
Zemeckis’ elliptical approach to the storytelling (for example leaving out the
rescue itself, or most of the detail about how Hanks reintegrates into the
world) is always intriguing.

I also mentioned the
film’s famous “co-star” – the volleyball that’s washed up on the island in a
FedEx package, on which Hanks draws a face using his own blood and to whom he
converses at increasing length as his exile lengthens. Called “Wilson,” the
idea never becomes comic, largely because the face looks more ghoulish than
cute. Zemeckis gets perilously close to anthropomorphism here though, through
such devices as the wind or the waves nudging Wilson into a nod or shake. But
like most everything else in the film, it holds together.

Ultimately, Cast Away succeeds substantially. It
never seems like a mere stunt. Numerous aspects that might seem strained on
paper (the character’s presumably symbolic surname of “Noland”; the irony of an
efficiency-obsessed clockwatcher ending up with nothing but time on his hands)
are dispatched deftly. I’ve argued above that the film could have been better,
but the likes of Rivette and Antonioni would never have come even vaguely to
mind if it weren’t as good as it is.

Thursday, July 6, 2017

I’ve cut down in the
past few years on my movie-related reading, but I still get through enough that
it’s hard for me to be truly surprised by a film. Even at the Toronto film
festival, I’ve generally already read reviews from Cannes or elsewhere for most
of the things I see – although admittedly I’m not as adventurous as I might be
in my selections. But the other day, I was reading the latest issue of the
British movie magazine Sight and Sound
(which by the way, like everything, used to be better in the old days) and I
was amazed to see that the film’s lead review, its “main attraction” for the
month, went to Ginger Snaps, a recent
Canadian film just opening in the UK.

Overlooked movie

I certainly knew
about Ginger Snaps, and I knew it had
received generally positive reviews, but somehow it had never occurred to me I
might actually go and see it. It’s hard to say why. I don’t think it’s much of
a title, and the trailer made it look like Carrie
3 under a different name. But perhaps it’s also that since Ginger Snaps hasn’t opened in the US
yet, I was missing the background whirr of publicity and discussion that almost
subliminally generates a sense of a film in one’s mind. Maybe if the Canadian
cultural mainstream had got behind the film as it does with, say, an Atom
Egoyan project, it wouldn’t have mattered as much. I’m sure I’ve read more
about Egoyan’s next film Ararat in
the Canadian press than about Ginger
Snaps, and the thing doesn’t even come out until next year.

Sight and Sound described Ginger Snaps as a “sparky, sharp film marked by intelligent
dialogue and a complex view of that moment when girls hover on the brink of
womanhood but would rather not take the next step.” This endorsement succeeded
for me where Eye and Now had failed, and I went to see the
film – fortunately still playing at the Carlton – the next day. And the thing
that occurred to me quite early on is now seldom I see horror movies nowadays
(there’s no point pretending Ginger Snaps
isn’t squarely within the horror genre), and if I see them at all, they belong
either to the world of low-budget digital video or to that of high-concept
special effects.

Ginger Snaps reminded me of the experience of watching
something like Kathryn Bigelow’s Near
Dark in 1987 (I’m not sure I have a much more recent example) – it loves
the fact that it’s a horror film, but doesn’t allow that to usurp the
considerations of theme and character, and it has an authentically gritty,
intimate feeling to it. It feels like a real movie. And the fact that it’s
Canadian, of course, is all the better. Egoyan and Cronenberg and Lepage are
all great – well, half-great at least – but Canadian cinema will never achieve
critical mass without a solid base of viable genre movies.

Horror movies

Ginger Snaps is about two outcast teenage sisters, living
in an unidentified, bland Canadian suburb – they do the gothic thing, take
faked snuff photos of each other, and have a suicide pact that’s supposed to
kick in when they’re sixteen. Ginger, the older of the two, is bitten one night
by an unidentified beast that’s been slaughtering the local dogs. Her scars
heal mysteriously quickly, but then they start to sprout thick hairs. Ginger
develops some powerful instincts she’s never had before. She grows a tail. And,
on the night all this starts, she gets her first period, causing some ambiguity
over what’s a symptom of what. The second sister hooks up with a local drug
dealer who’s into mythology and tries to help her figure out a cure, but
meanwhile Ginger is mutating out of control, and infecting the neighborhood as
she goes.

A few weeks ago, for
reasons that are rather obscure, I received a DVD of the Stephen King film Cujo as a gift. I’d never seen it, and
it turns out to be entertaining enough, but it seems very much like an
adaptation of a novel in that it’s full of unresolved, disconnected plot
strands that surely wouldn’t have existed in a screenplay created more
autonomously. I haven’t read King’s book, but I’m guessing that the encounter
with the rabid Cujo must have served there in part as a metaphor, as a mode of
resolution for the various traumas set up earlier. The movie comes over as
forty-five minutes of stilted personal travails resembling outtakes from a
daytime soap opera, followed by forty-five minutes of a crazy dog. The second
half at least is well staged and quite suspenseful, but the overall shape of
the film didn’t make much sense to me.

Positive images

I’m just mentioning Cujo because it’s the last example I
saw, but this messiness seems to be pretty typical of the genre. Ginger Snaps is unusually integrated and
cohesive, whether measured by its preoccupations or its plot. I thought the
movie was at its best when at its most energetically allusive – juxtaposing
menstrual blood with that of Ginger’s victims; or dramatizing how she swings
between fear and revulsion at what’s happening to her, and fully sexualized
divadom where she harnesses the beast and struts her stuff. Her sister- starting off even less well-adjusted than
Ginger – subtly matures through the demands of coping the crisis, setting up a
neat counterpoint in rites of passage. And their mildly deranged (in the sense
that yours probably is too) mother, played by Mimi Rogers, trying hopelessly to
embody a positive image for the kids, contributes a witty portrait of the
future that’s at stake.

Katharine Isabelle
makes a terrific centre for the film as Ginger – she really commands the
screen. Ginger Snaps isn’t perfect
though. Too much perhaps is made of the anonymity of the Ontario suburbs –
things have a rather under-populated, unspecific feeling that at times takes
events too far toward abstraction. And it seems to me that the film ultimately
turns into too much of a pure monster movie, leaving several interesting
strands unresolved, although not to the extent of Cujo. Maybe this is something no horror movie can avoid, however
smart it might be.

Which leaves me with
the mild guilt of having discovered the year’s most enjoyable Canadian film
only by virtue of a British magazine. Well, I’m viewing that as a learning
experience. But maybe I should resubscribe to some of that other stuff I
canceled.

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).